Category: Masters in Digital Technologies for Language Teaching

Methodology: Design-Based Research Some time ago I read Community Indicators: a framework for observing and supporting community activity on Cloudworks by Galley et al. (2014) which proposes four key factors which underpin successful online collaborative groups: participation, cohesion, identity and creative capability. Before digging deeper into these aspects of community experience, I was pulled towards the methodology…

My Update Many months since my last post and I have lost the rhythm of reading and writing academic journals. I know I enjoyed it in the past, and thus, I am convinced that the feeling will come back again in time. And seeing as I want to get back into the swing of things in…

CIF I am now reading about another framework that supports online community activity by Alevizou, Conole and Galley (2012). The community indicators are Participation, Cohesion, Identity and Creative Capability. There is some overlap with another research paper I read and blogged about recently about the key elements of an educational experience – Cognitive presence, Social presence and Teacher presence…

Activities that support online community of inquiry In my previous post I listed some of my own ideas to facilitate cognitive, social and teacher presence in an online learning environment. I thought it would be interesting to put them side-by-side with some of the examples given in the paper. Although I do not plan to run…

Critical Enquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education by Garrison, Anderson & Archer (2000) puts forward a learning concept and a tool for computer-mediated communication (CMC) in supporting an educational experience. The concept of Community of Inquiry (CoI) concerns knowledge formation and the process of scientific inquiry to solve problems within a…

Above is my original PLE. I made at the start of my Masters in Digital Technologies for Language Teaching just over two years ago. It would seem that my world at that time was divided simply in two, where I gained and shared knowledge through and with people and computers. It looks like I had…

Technological developments make learning online convenient, accessible and in many cases, free. Yet, there are stories of high dropout rates and the fear of loneliness confirms distance is both geographical and psychological. So can online programmes be effectively designed to allow learners to feel part of a community and thus go the distance of the course? This…